


Carpe

by Antosha



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Department of Mysteries Six, F/M, Hogwarts Chamber of Secrets, Melodrama, Mostly Gen, Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:20:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24007996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antosha/pseuds/Antosha
Summary: Back in the Chamber of Secrets again, and Voldemort is confronted with the power he knows not. (Writtenjustpost-HBP.)
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Kudos: 4





	Carpe

The snake’s body writhed and flopped on the damp stone floor, even as its severed head lay still, its huge fangs sunk into the silver hand of a very dead Peter Pettigrew.  
  
“What a waste,” Voldemort drawled, his corpse-white skin slick with panic sweat. Harry was intrigued, in a detached way, to see that their prolonged duel was taking a greater toll on the older wizard. “You really must stop letting other people die for you, boy.”  
  
“Hardly a waste,” Harry said, bringing his wand and Gryffindor’s ichor-stained sword to bear across the Chamber of Secrets on Voldemort’s panting chest. “He died because he loved my parents after all. And Nagini was the last.”  
  
“The... last?”  
  
“Horcrux,” Harry said, and for the first time something like fear twisted the snake-like features of the self-proclaimed Dark Lord.  
  
A low tumble of footsteps sounded behind Harry; he didn’t need to turn around. He knew whose they were.  
  
Voldemort’s wand flicked, but Harry called, “I wouldn’t, Tom. If you try to curse one of my friends, I’ll kill you were you stand.”  
  
“You can’t... _Don’t call me that_!” screamed Voldemort. “My servants will...” His threat seemed to fall with a dull thud to the Chamber floor.  
  
“Well,” Ron said, his voice deep and low, “Lupin’s killed Greyback, so he’s leading the werewolves now, and Grawp’s taken over the giants.”  
  
Neville jumped in, his voice almost unrecognizable. “The Lestranges are dead. The Carrows ran away, and so did the Goyles and Avery. And I don’t think Mrs. Malfoy likes you very much just at the moment.”  
  
“And you’re down to your last life,” Hermione added primly. “No followers and thoroughly mortal. Don’t sound like much of a Lord _Anything_ to me.”  
  
“It’s the problem with ruling through fear, Tom,” Luna mused. “They’re all more afraid to be with you, now, win or lose, than they were to leave you.”  
  
Voldemort’s wand hand was trembling with what seemed to be a combination of rage and fear. “You... You can’t have destroyed...”  
  
“Oh, but we did, Tom,” Ginny said, the hard edge of a bitter smile coloring her voice. “Harry plunged a Basilisk’s tooth through your diary about five feet from where you’re standing. You can still see the ink stains.” The older wizard seemed determined not to look down. “Dumbledore destroyed the Gaunts’ signet ring last year. Hagrid used some of the Unicorn blood that you spilt in the forest six years back to remove the curse on the locket that Regulus Black stole from the cave. Ron and Neville figured out how to dissolve Ravenclaw’s mirror in the acid of a Venomous Tentacula. And Luna and Hermione followed Professor Snape’s directions and used Dragon blood to destroy Hufflepuff’s bowl. That snake was the last.”  
  
Desperate, red eyes focused on Harry. “Then I shall kill _you_ , boy!”  
  
Harry laughed. “Do. That would fulfill the prophecy, meaning that you would be vulnerable to _anyone_. And trust me, my friends know how to kill you.”  
  
Of all of the lessons that a childhood with the Dursleys had taught him, Harry had forgotten the most basic: a cornered bully is the most dangerous. Tom Riddle tensed to strike.  
  
Harry, however, was faster. He flicked his wand like an angler casting a line and bellowed, “ _Carpe Anima_!”  
  
Like an angler’s fly jerked back on a line, a pearl of light flicked out of Voldemort’s chest. Harry had seen such a pearl before: it was Tom Riddle’s soul—what was left of it. The previous time that Harry had been exposed to the sight, it had nearly blinded him; this time, the soul’s light flickered like a dim candle.  
  
Another flick of the wand, and Riddle’s soul was dashed against the floor, shattering like a glass Christmas ornament on the flagstones. There was a _pop_ and a flash—Harry thought of the time Dudley and Piers had dropped a florescent tube from the top of their school building, missing him by inches, scaring the life out of him. Voldemort’s face was frozen in a mask of open horror—  
  
—and then it broke into a twisted smile. Harry blinked. Riddle wasn’t dead. Harry had been sure that the removal of the last portion of his soul would kill Voldemort; so, for that matter, had Voldemort himself. And yet there he stood, still as close to living as he had ever been. “It seems you have missed one,” sneered Voldemort, as he thrust his wand toward Harry and howled, “ _Avada Kedavra!_ ”  
  
The green bolt shot toward Harry, but before he even had a chance to think, let alone move, a flash of red and gold sped in front of him and blocked the curse. Harry prepared to return fire, but Voldemort’s face was once again frozen, and this time it was for good. His body collapsed inwards, like the ashes of a log that collapse at a puff of wind.  
  
Blinking, Harry looked down, expecting to see, perhaps, Fawkes, reduced to a chick once again by the Death Curse. What he saw instead was the still form of Ginny Weasley crumpled at his feet.  
  
“NO!” The Chamber echoed with the cry, and stunned as he was, Harry knew that it did not come from his throat alone. He fell to his knees and pulled her still-warm body to his own. Ron, Hermione, Luna and Neville threw themselves on him and Ginny's corpse.  
  
The dream of what he had discovered with her during their brief time together the previous spring had been one of the things that had sustained through this long, dark year. The promise of her lips, her skin on his. It seemed impossible that that had been the outside limit of their time, but here she was, limp in his arms. “Don’t die, Ginny, God, please don’t be dead.”  
  
But she was.  
  
It was supposed to be Harry who died. Or if he lived, it was to repay Ginny for the patience and loyalty that she had shown him.  
  
The debt that had been repaid, however, had been hers, a debt forged in that same Chamber six years earlier, a debt Harry would rather have died himself than see satisfied in such a way. Tom Riddle had said he needed to stop letting other people die for him, and yet he had been unable to do so, even to the last.  
  
As Harry felt his weeping friends dragging him up and out of the Chamber of Secrets, Tom Riddle’s remains disintegrating behind them, Ginny’s body still grasped in his arms, he felt empty, as dead as if Voldemort’s curse had hit him after all. Sobbing, Hermione blubbered, “She knew, she knew, she knew that part of him was in her, from when the diary possessed her, that’s it—when Voldemort killed her, it released the last portion of his soul. He killed himself.”  
  
Harry wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t. He had just realized that he would never truly grasp just what he had lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah. Sad. Sorry. Really.
> 
> So this is another of my Ginny-pays-her-debt-in-the-Chamber stories (along with "Water" and "Fidelias"). Okay, so it's not really so much a story as a dramatic working out of a rather melodramatic idea I had about how the final Harry/Voldemort confrontation might work itself out, and of Ginny-as-Horcrux/Ginny-with-Life-Debt, which I had begun to explore in Monster, and which JKR in her wisdom would promptly blow up in the MuggleNet/Leaky Cauldron interviews. 
> 
> _Carpe anima_ still sounds like a cool spell. :-)


End file.
